recommended production environment

I've been doing many benchmarks these last few days using different options for environments. I am testing this with a few vmware linux boxes on my Windows desktop. I know this doens't represent a production server, but I believe it does give me some indications about best possible performance configuration, for later deployment on a real hardware.

I have repeated these tests many, many times. And they tell me that LSWS performs much better on kernel 2.4 than kernel 2.6.

So, my questions are:

1) Does it make any sense of LSWS running slower on kernel 2.6? Can others confirm this? (I am running the ab benchmark util and lsws on the same linux server, would this cause lower performance hit on kernel 2.6?)

2) What is the lab environment on litespeedtech? Can I assume "Fedore Core 3 with kernel 2.6.10-1.760" as noted on the benchmark pages? If you tried a 2.4 kernel, would the benchmarks get higher?

3) Would glibc libraries, perl version and other packages also influence the benchmarks? If so, does any one have best version recommendations?

George, thanks for your reply. I changed it to "epoll", but I didn't notice much change, at least with my two linux boxes inside vmware. Maybe kernel 2.6 doesn't perform well with vmware drivers... Unfortunately, I don't have a "real" server available for testing at the moment.

I would love to see other people's experience with other distribution and kernel comparisons.